Can you dedicate your next workday to getting set up with email marketing? If you
can just clear your plate for one day and use my three simple steps, you can be
fully set up to start email marketing. These steps I'm about to outline
seem like kind of a lot and truthfully they are but the trick is to just keep
moving through them, set aside perfection for just one day, and keep things as
simple as possible. Nothing in business is ever 100% finished, and you can always
go back and improve and add but I find that for most people that pressure of
perfection and getting it 100% right the first time is what holds us back from
getting anything done. And email marketing is so important to an online
business in fact everything I do in my business goes back to two things: they
always point back to growing my website traffic and growing my email list. My
website and my email list are the only two things I fully control and own. My
social media handles and profiles are actually owned by the social media
platforms that they're on and I'm there at their discretion but I own my website
and I own my email list. With those two things I can weather a lot of business
storms. So without further ado let's jump into these three steps.
So first we need somewhere to collect all these email addresses that we're going to be getting
and that is in an email service provider. In my marketing career I've used almost
a dozen different email marketing platforms. Some were in my corporate
career some have been on behalf of clients that I work with, and some of
them are ones that I actually use and employ in my own business of Molly
Marshall Marketing and I can tell you that I have seen the good, the bad, and
the very ugly of email marketing platforms. I'm not going to do a deep
dive into how to pick the best email marketing platform for you but i'm just
gonna give you an overview and a couple of things to think about. So the first is
features. Pretty obvious, right? But it's really important to think about how
you're going to be using your email marketing platform in your business.
For instance you might think about: do you need to be able to use your email
marketing for complex automations or sales funnels
or even complicated tagging? Or, are you just gonna use it to touch base with
your subscribers once a month, in like a newsletter format? Another thing you
might want to think about is: do you need your email marketing platform to have
really nice opt-in pages and customizable forms, or are you using a
separate tool? I encourage you to just spend like 15 minutes thinking about
what your needs are now and what you need for when you grow. Can you start
with something simple now and move to a new platform in the future? Is that going
to be a really big pain to you? Is that going to be a really big expense? There
isn't a right or wrong answer, you just need to figure out what's best for you.
The next thing to think about is cost. All of these features whether you have
them or you don't are going to influence the cost of the platform. So on the low
end you have something like a MailChimp that can sometimes even be used for free
up until you have a certain subscriber number. That's on the low end. On the high
end it could be an email marketing platform that's part of a larger CRM or
a customer relationship management software that could be costing thousands
of dollars a year. Again, you'll need to balance your needs with what you're able
and willing to pay right now. I have two email marketing platforms that I
recommend and use. The first one is that I use personally in my own business and
it is ConvertKit. I mentioned earlier in this video that I've used almost a dozen
different email marketing platforms over the years and what I love about
ConvertKit is that it is so versatile robust and affordable. I don't want to
bad-mouth platforms that I've used in the past, but the overarching reason was
that they just weren't robust and didn't have the features that I needed at a
price that I can afford. While I might pay a little bit more each month to use
ConvertKit I was also able to simplify the tools that I use in my business and
I even was able to eliminate like a separate landing page tool so in the end
I'm saving money. If you'd like to know more about why I use and love and
recommend ConvertKit you can watch my ConvertKit demo video which is linked
below. There's another email marketing platform that I recommend and I
recommend this one for either smaller clients, or people that are just getting
started with email marketing and don't have a list yet or don't have a very big
list, or local businesses and that is MailChimp. MailChimp is really easy
and simple to use and it's extremely affordable so it's a great option to
start on. So next after you've secured your email service provider, you need an
incentive to get people to join your list, and this is called
a lead magnet. So one option, one thing you could do, is just create your email
list and start telling people about it and asking them to join. But truthfully
and realistically most people are going to ignore that and not join your list. So
the most effective way to build your list is through some kind of exchange of
value. You're saying, "if you provide your email address to me, I will give you
something that's going to help you and move you forward." Whether it's in your
business or in your life or in your relationships, it depends on what
business you're in but it's that exchange of value. Lead
magnets are known by tons of different names so you may have heard them called
things like freebies, opt-ins, free gifts, freemiums, or even content upgrades,
they're all the same thing. Since we're trying to get you all set up
with email marketing in just one business day, we need to keep this pretty
simple but I'm going to give you three characteristics of great lead magnets. The
first is that your lead magnet is related to your core offer. So I'm going
to give you an example here: if you're a web designer your core offer is that you
offer web design services. What you want is for people to hire you to build them
a web site. So a good example of a lead magnet might be like a checklist of
questions that people should ask a potential web designer before they hire
them, or maybe it's some kind of guide on what the best website platform is like
WordPress versus Squarespace. And in that lead magnet, what you would want to do is
make whatever platform that you like to develop on the "winner" to encourage
people to go your way and to hire you. A poor example for a lead magnet for a web
designer would be something on, you know, how to drive more traffic to your
website. While it's related and while it's valuable that doesn't help them to
make that decision to hire you for their web design needs. That's actually
something that they would need after they had a new website so that's not
helping them down their buyer's journey. Number two is that it's quick and easy
to consume great ideas for your very first lead magnet are
things like short educational videos, checklists, PDF guides, a quiz, an
email-based mini course, like maybe three of your favorite tips dripped out over a
few days, or even something like a free trial. It should be fairly quick and easy
to consume. From time to time you do see larger lead magnets like free ebooks
being offered, but for now because we want to keep moving forward, we want to
get people consuming this content, we want to get it created, we want to get it
out there, we're gonna keep it really simple. Third is that your lead magnet
provides a quick win or transformation. A great lead magnet solves a very specific
issue and after someone has had a chance to go through it and consume it there
should be some change for them. So like in my earlier example of the web
designer that created a checklist of questions that people should ask a
potential hire, someone that they want to hire to do web design work for them that
gives the person consuming a concrete tool to use that actually helps them
make a decision by taking some of the stress off and letting them know the
types of questions that they should ask. So now we have a lead magnet to offer in
exchange for an email address, and we have somewhere for those email addresses
to go in an email service provider. The last thing we need to bridge the gap
between those two is an opt-in form. Both ConvertKit and MailChimp have simple
forms that are easy to customize and embed anywhere on your website and
ConvertKit even has a more advanced option where you can create standalone
opt-in pages that look really nice. You can see more about how that works with
ConvertKit by watching the demo video that I have linked below. So in addition
to a title that describes what lead magnet you're offering, your opt-in form
just needs three simple things. The first is a field for their first name, the
second is a field for an email address, and the third is a button with a great
call to action on it. There are a few other bells and whistles you can add to a form to
increase conversions and they are a thumbnail of the lead magnet so people
can kind of see what they're getting, and the other thing is just a few
benefits-focused bullets that communicate what they're going to gain by downloading
whatever it is you have to offer. So first with the informational fields I
recommend only asking for first name and email address. I like to keep things
really, really simple and by only asking for name and email you're removing a lot
of the barriers for someone to fill that out. The longer your form is the less
likely someone is to get through it and you really want to exchange that value
really quickly. You want to get that name and email address and you want to be
able to send them what they're requesting from you. Once you get someone
on your list you can always go back and ask for more information, you can ask
them to update their subscriber info and you can also learn a lot about them by
watching what they do in emails you, can pay attention to the types of links they
click. You can learn so much about them by their behavior over time so you don't
need to ask for it all up front. Next was the call to action on the button. You can
make your button more enticing to click by steering clear of things like "submit"
or "enter" or "sign up." Those types of things are a little boring and can be a
little intimidating so especially something like sign up like it makes it
sound like you're gonna send them a ton of stuff. So you can do something like
"send me my guide" or "yes! I want in" or something like that that's just really
active and exciting and makes people want to click. An image of your lead
magnet is also a really nice thing to add. People like to kind of see what
they're getting. It doesn't need to be readable, you don't want them to be able
to consume the whole thing from the thumbnail, but just give them an idea of
what to expect. It doesn't have to be perfect or super fancy but you can hire
a graphic designer on a site like Upwork or Fiverr, or you can even do it
yourself and just take things kind of to the next level, add a little design
element to it in a free program like Canva. Finally, if you have room add a few
bullets about what someone will gain by consuming your lead magnet. For instance
on my Instagram strategy guide landing page I tell people that I'm sharing
secrets to powerful storytelling that propel customers to buy, I'm sharing
dozens of content ideas to keep their creative juices flowing, and tips on
hashtags to ensure that their posts reach more potential customers. So
chances are, you already have an email marketing platform that you're using. You
just need to put your head down on creating a lead magnet and creating an
opt-in form that converts. Once these pieces are in place, you're ready to
start list building and that's a topic that I'm going to cover in a future
video. In the meantime, if you'd like to learn more about how to properly onboard
new subscribers, and how to grow your list large and fast, you can sign up for
my on demand email marketing workshop at MollyMarshallMarketing.com/email
In the comments below tell me your idea for a lead magnet and make
sure to subscribe for future videos.
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